Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

I just got introduced to Unigo, a resource for University planning, and thought I’d at least drop a quick note about it. It’s essentially a guide to Colleges & Universities, ala the US News or Princeton Review yearly College Rankings. Except, it’s free, and built by volunteers.

You can check out the Cornell University page, which I’ve taken a snapshot of:

The service is essentially a competitor to Wikipedia (Cornell); we’ll see how it fares over time. Right now Wikipedia has better concrete information, but Unigo wins on the social side, with ratings, videos, and photos.

A recent NY Times article, The Tell-All Campus Tour, explains more about the service:

Said Adam Freelander, a Unigo managing editor: “Even the best guidebooks kind of make it seem like every college in the country is an awesome place to be, no matter who you are. And that’s not true.”

“For so long, the colleges have been able to have this stranglehold on the P.R. image of their school,” Goldman said recently in his office, decorated boy-workaholic-style with nothing but an open box of Frosted Flakes and a toy robotic dinosaur. “It’s just harder to look at them as the main source of information. If you’re a college student, you are as much of an expert on being a student at that college as anyone.”

I’m adding a link to my sidebar for this site, and hope it continues to develop and grow.

If you’ve noticed, the Hotel school page got a redesign recently! It looks much cleaner now:

The website has valid markup and appears to render correctly in Firefox, IE 7, and Safari 3. However, there are a few things that could use improvement:

1) Too many objects

If you look at a loading time estimator or dig into their source code, you’ll see that they actually have 5 CSS files totaling 53.3 KB of data. These should be combined into a single CSS file to reduce the loading time. Additionally, some work should be done to reduce the number of images (28) on the page. The tagline-red-short, tagline-red, and stripe-type images could be replaced with CSS styling.

2) No compression

The website’s textual content, which is 63.2 kb, is uncompressed. Using my mod_deflate tutorial they could reduce their text content to 19 kb. They could probably shave another 10 kb by using the png format instead of ancient, and proprietary gif. Basically, 1/3 of the data on that page could be losslessly reduced!

3) Weird menu links

I expected the links at the top to make themselves known when I roll over them, but they just change color. Here is a more usable idea:

4) No autocomplete

When I start typing Statler, you guys should know what Statler is and present a drop-down list of things which might lead to Statler, or Stately Dinners, or Statistics in the Hotel School:

5) No RSS feeds

Um, there is no RSS feed for your news. So, how am I supposed to keep informed? You don’t *actually* expect me to come by and visit this page all the time, do you?

6) Ugly features links colors

Take a look at this, it’s like something from a bad Microsoft Publisher template:

7) Inconsistent calendar colors

The colors on the Calendar vary randomly. Perhaps that is intended to convey information I don’t understand, but it looks very weird:

Development artifacts

Things like this shouldn’t be left in your code:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/main-section-template.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->

9) A lonely footer

The footer is way too sparse for my taste:

Overall it’s a nice redesign, but it looks half-done. There’s nothing special about it, so I wonder what the hotel school really offers. This is in contrast to the homepage redesign, which makes Cornell look alive and dynamic, but light years ahead of the CS department (which 404s if you don’t use the www fake subdomain). The best Cornell redesign site, though, is Engineering, which looks awesome. Any thoughts, Christian?

I’d like to congratulate Cornell University Photography for embracing RSS. If you go to their website, you will now see a little orange XML box:

If you click on said orange box, rather than being taken to a feed, you are taken to this meta-feed page with another orange box:

If you click on this orange box, identical to the last one except in indirection, you don’t get an RSS feed, because it’s not linked. You have to copy and paste the URL in the page into your browser. Then you can read Cornell University Photo News:

At once, it dawned on me that Cornell University is completely technically incompetent:

• They’re using the wrong feed icon. They should be using this industry standard feed icon
• None of their pages have the feed autodiscovery element, so none of the web will ever find their feed
• You have to click on an icon, then copy paste a URL to view the feed. The icon, dears, should LINK TO THE FEED!!!!!
• The feeds provide a link to a batch of updated content without telling you anything about what’s new

Besides fixing the usability problems of your feed links, the standard look and feel of the feed icon, and the semantic structure of the feed link element, you also need to fix the feed content. Your feed should look this: